A
post on NeoGAF from Respawn Entertainment's Drew McCoy reacts to conspiracy
theories suggesting that Titanfall's positive reception is the result of
them bribing corrupt game journalists to favor the mech shooter (thanks
OXM via
VG247). Here's what he had to say:

Anyone who thinks we weren't
living in the shadow of decade+ old established franchises at our reveal at E3
are as crazy as their conspiracy theories of anyone getting paid off. We've had
to fight tooth and nail to have a game that anyone would even know existed, let
alone be excited for and want to create coverage of. I get it that its not for
everyone, but to say we're paying anyone off is downright insanity. Not to
mention the height of insulting.

Beamer wrote on Feb 21, 2014, 12:47:Microsoft has the possibility of selling a console per sale.

Unfortunately for Microsoft this game isn't going to be the big system seller for them imo.This game comes out on the 360 as well, and people who buys this are buying it for the MP not for the SP.While I was playing on the 360 I was buying games my friends had so we could play MP.In this case if a person wants to get this game with an Xbone but all his friends are still on the 360, well you know what is going to happen there.If Titanfall was exclusive to the Xbox one and PC then yes this game would have been a system seller.We will see how the sales numbers turn out.

I agree entirely. I want to play Titanfall. I don't know if I will, but I'm more interested in this game than nearly any other (yet I'll probably play Saints Row 4 instead of buying this, since I haven't yet.)

But I don't see myself buying an Xbox One for this. Why? What advantage does it have? Better graphics, but it's still a port so not significantly better graphics. A smaller user base, so probably longer matchmaking times.

Microsoft has a lot riding on this, but I think it will be another disappointment. It will probably sell really well, but like you said, for the wrong system.

Beamer wrote on Feb 21, 2014, 12:47:Microsoft has the possibility of selling a console per sale.

Unfortunately for Microsoft this game isn't going to be the big system seller for them imo.This game comes out on the 360 as well, and people who buys this are buying it for the MP not for the SP.While I was playing on the 360 I was buying games my friends had so we could play MP.In this case if a person wants to get this game with an Xbone but all his friends are still on the 360, well you know what is going to happen there.If Titanfall was exclusive to the Xbox one and PC then yes this game would have been a system seller.We will see how the sales numbers turn out.

Verno wrote on Feb 21, 2014, 12:25:It's not just EA, Microsoft really needs this game to be a massive success and you can bet they will leverage their major industry presence to ensure it is. From a business perspective it makes sense.

EA has little skin in this. They're distributing, which means they only make a bit of money. They have no long term investment here.

Microsoft doesn't, either, but Microsoft needs something to sell consoles desperately. This is a much, much, much bigger deal to them than to EA. EA will make a buck or three per sale, which in the long run isn't much for them. Microsoft has the possibility of selling a console per sale.

Verno wrote on Feb 21, 2014, 12:25:It's not just EA, Microsoft really needs this game to be a massive success and you can bet they will leverage their major industry presence to ensure it is. From a business perspective it makes sense.

Good point. Still, I think McCoy could probably be forgiven for the vehemence of his statement considering how much work he and his team obviously poured into putting this game out. That doesn't mean he is correct in his assumption that none of the glowing reviews were paid for of course...

“The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.” - Mahatma Gandhi

On the one hand his reaction is understandable. If I was a developer and I worked my ass on a game and believed that the positive reviews were well-earned I would react the same way. On the other hand, this guy ought to at least be conscientious of the fact that his publisher is known to do shady things all the damn time and have brought this kind of suspicion on themselves.

“The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.” - Mahatma Gandhi

SmyTTor wrote on Feb 21, 2014, 01:16:Rather than say the game sucks in general, I'll say why it isn't very good, for me.

I realize this is beta and use that grain of salt liberally when seeing the entire opening day scrubbed due to server connectivity issues on MS's side. I do not think it was okay to have the graphics on PC look as dated as they did so close to public release. But, I will say that even bumped up to max, the game ran very smoothly on a mid-range machine.

The auto-aim code is strong with this one. Aside from a weapon that can lock on and automatically track and kill multiple things at once, there is far too much correction going on. You can especially see this in the immediate death replays while waiting to respawn. Or when you wonder how the hell you just hit that guy when your cursor ended up blocked by the wall.

There is way too much one-shot killing. You can kill a guy with a shotgun clipping a foot. You can one-shot anyone from about 7-8 meters away with a flying kick. I'm not kidding. I topped an entire match solely (get it?!) by meleeing.

This is not a mech game. When you get your titan, you are pretty much a wrecking machine if you come across any other player. It's not that it's all just power, you also have about as much speed of movement and agility. That side-step is powerful, even with having it as two very short-timed charges. In one quick backslide I splattered 4 pilots and 4 npcs.

The npcs on each side end up making it harder to locate actual players. However it's a strange mix. The flow of combat is so inhibited by so many features that are crammed into the game. Like the cloaking ability, and the mini-map pointing out enemy locations, and the FOV being capped as it is. Don't get me wrong, those would have their places in other games, but it seems like it was about how many features from other popular games they could put in "Titanfall" rather than how they actually affected game play.

I actually really like the way the double jump/wall sprinting mechanics were implemented and that alone would have been amazing. I just don't think everything combined the way it is fits together into one coherent game.

Lest anyone try calling me out, I was really pumped for this game. I'm not an EA fan, but this game really caught my eye. The game just feels like a run-of-the-mill FPS console port with little else going for it at this point.

I will personally be passing on this game. The only other upcoming FPS that caught my eye was "Tom Clancy's The Division" and I really hope that turns out well.

I don't think I'm going to read through all these posts, but in case anyone was wondering... I really enjoyed the two days I played this during beta. Didn't encounter any issues beyond the usual "how the fuck did I not kill him!" but that's common to any FPS. I really like the mix of titans, players, and AI, and didn't feel at all like 12 players was too little despite thinking I would upon the initial announcement. The chaos is just at the right level for me and I have tons of fun rodeo riding titans and playing RPG-meister from the rooftops. Netcode was very solid for me, gunplay was so-so but definitely not a negative like I often find the BF series to be.

SmyTTor wrote on Feb 21, 2014, 01:16:Rather than say the game sucks in general, I'll say why it isn't very good, for me.

I realize this is beta and use that grain of salt liberally when seeing the entire opening day scrubbed due to server connectivity issues on MS's side. I do not think it was okay to have the graphics on PC look as dated as they did so close to public release. But, I will say that even bumped up to max, the game ran very smoothly on a mid-range machine.

The auto-aim code is strong with this one. Aside from a weapon that can lock on and automatically track and kill multiple things at once, there is far too much correction going on. You can especially see this in the immediate death replays while waiting to respawn. Or when you wonder how the hell you just hit that guy when your cursor ended up blocked by the wall.

There is way too much one-shot killing. You can kill a guy with a shotgun clipping a foot. You can one-shot anyone from about 7-8 meters away with a flying kick. I'm not kidding. I topped an entire match solely (get it?!) by meleeing.

This is not a mech game. When you get your titan, you are pretty much a wrecking machine if you come across any other player. It's not that it's all just power, you also have about as much speed of movement and agility. That side-step is powerful, even with having it as two very short-timed charges. In one quick backslide I splattered 4 pilots and 4 npcs.

The npcs on each side end up making it harder to locate actual players. However it's a strange mix. The flow of combat is so inhibited by so many features that are crammed into the game. Like the cloaking ability, and the mini-map pointing out enemy locations, and the FOV being capped as it is. Don't get me wrong, those would have their places in other games, but it seems like it was about how many features from other popular games they could put in "Titanfall" rather than how they actually affected game play.

I actually really like the way the double jump/wall sprinting mechanics were implemented and that alone would have been amazing. I just don't think everything combined the way it is fits together into one coherent game.

Lest anyone try calling me out, I was really pumped for this game. I'm not an EA fan, but this game really caught my eye. The game just feels like a run-of-the-mill FPS console port with little else going for it at this point.

I will personally be passing on this game. The only other upcoming FPS that caught my eye was "Tom Clancy's The Division" and I really hope that turns out well.

See, I have the absolute opposite opinion. I've been bored of multiplayer fps pretty much since TF2 was new. I had a very brief fling with BF3 and dinked around with some of the other lackluster games in the genre the last couple years, but it's just been so bland lately. Titanfall caught my eye a little bit, just because of all the attention, but I figured it would just be call of duty with mech suits. What we actually got kind of blows me away with all of the bold moves.

I agree with you that there are a lot of weird ideas in Titanfall, and they don't always work together - but I think that's more of a balance issue than anything else. To me it feels like everything is there for a purpose. The focus on autoaim makes cover and maneuverability important, and helps with issues like lag and mouse/controller discrepancies. The maneuverability and cloaking help for autoaim, and give soldiers an advantage over the sheer firepower and size of the titans. The titans are really fun to pilot, and give pilots extra survivability - they are like having an extra life. I don't particularly like the ai elements, but I can see the design goals at work (make the fight feel bigger than it is, without decending into madness, or limiting # of titans per team, or other solutions).

I think with so many elements, the balance is a bit off.

But overall, I haven't had this much fun in this genre in a long time.

Yeah this bribery nonsense - it's EA, there probably is some of that going on - but even if it's true it's absolutely unnecessary.

Rather than say the game sucks in general, I'll say why it isn't very good, for me.

I realize this is beta and use that grain of salt liberally when seeing the entire opening day scrubbed due to server connectivity issues on MS's side. I do not think it was okay to have the graphics on PC look as dated as they did so close to public release. But, I will say that even bumped up to max, the game ran very smoothly on a mid-range machine.

The auto-aim code is strong with this one. Aside from a weapon that can lock on and automatically track and kill multiple things at once, there is far too much correction going on. You can especially see this in the immediate death replays while waiting to respawn. Or when you wonder how the hell you just hit that guy when your cursor ended up blocked by the wall.

There is way too much one-shot killing. You can kill a guy with a shotgun clipping a foot. You can one-shot anyone from about 7-8 meters away with a flying kick. I'm not kidding. I topped an entire match solely (get it?!) by meleeing.

This is not a mech game. When you get your titan, you are pretty much a wrecking machine if you come across any other player. It's not that it's all just power, you also have about as much speed of movement and agility. That side-step is powerful, even with having it as two very short-timed charges. In one quick backslide I splattered 4 pilots and 4 npcs.

The npcs on each side end up making it harder to locate actual players. However it's a strange mix. The flow of combat is so inhibited by so many features that are crammed into the game. Like the cloaking ability, and the mini-map pointing out enemy locations, and the FOV being capped as it is. Don't get me wrong, those would have their places in other games, but it seems like it was about how many features from other popular games they could put in "Titanfall" rather than how they actually affected game play.

I actually really like the way the double jump/wall sprinting mechanics were implemented and that alone would have been amazing. I just don't think everything combined the way it is fits together into one coherent game.

Lest anyone try calling me out, I was really pumped for this game. I'm not an EA fan, but this game really caught my eye. The game just feels like a run-of-the-mill FPS console port with little else going for it at this point.

I will personally be passing on this game. The only other upcoming FPS that caught my eye was "Tom Clancy's The Division" and I really hope that turns out well.

Creston wrote on Feb 20, 2014, 11:56:It's very possible that the game simply IS this good. I haven't played it, so I can't judge it. The videos make it look pretty decent, if also fairly standard pew pew pew hitscan multiplayer fare.

However, Drew McCoy, the publisher who is going to be publishing your game is absolutely very well known for paying people for positive opinions (or making it nigh impossible to give a negative one.) In fact, they are in the news for such horseshit just about once a month.

So for you to get all uppity and pretend like you work for some kind of bastion of game virtue is really quite amusing. Why do people suspect that opinions on your game have been bought? Well, because it's happened before, frequently, and because gamers are getting a bit tired of constantly being lied to by the shitheels that infest this industry.

This is the environment you work in, an environment that many of your fellow workers in this industry helped foster. Welcome to the real world.

I agree with this, game could be good, be all above board. But the industry has been caught red handed several times. So like other things, how many times are we to be lied to before we can actually just be down right doughtful? Sure it sucks from a Devs side when everything is above board, but they also have to understand where all this came from and not for us, but people that in fact did buy ratings and got caught. Forever tainted.

PHJF wrote on Feb 20, 2014, 17:10:There is literally the exact same thing in Blacklight: Retribution, except smaller in scale.

They also ripped the 'other team won but you can escape so you dont feel bad about losing maybe!' shit straight from BF2142. In fact this whole game is pretty much a miasma of derivative nerdisms.

I agree with most of the other posts, game is sorta fun sometimes when you aren't dying from random directions with no possible way to prevent your death but I don't see myself playing it alot. I played beta for 8 to 10 hours which I'm sure is long enough to be told I spent too much in it but short enough that I also suck at it and don't know what I'm talking about.

You must be thinking of something else, in BF2142 when you destroyed the other teams Titan it showed a cinematic of it going off with a bunch of explosions.

Redmask wrote on Feb 20, 2014, 19:31:They also ripped the 'other team won but you can escape so you dont feel bad about losing maybe!' shit straight from BF2142. In fact this whole game is pretty much a miasma of derivative nerdisms.

Which is fine with me, IF it's good.

Unfortunately, they said they'd do an open PC beta, but they never did.

Yes they did. I played it. I saw the posts here about how it wasn't going open, and I figured that must be due to the website being mostly broken at the time. I read those posts in between rounds of the open PC beta.

You didn't need a key or anything, just like SpectralMeat said. It just showed up in my Origin menu one day. I'm sincerely sorry you missed it, it kicked ass.

Redmask wrote on Feb 20, 2014, 19:31:They also ripped the 'other team won but you can escape so you dont feel bad about losing maybe!' shit straight from BF2142. In fact this whole game is pretty much a miasma of derivative nerdisms.

Which is fine with me, IF it's good.

Unfortunately, they said they'd do an open PC beta, but they never did.